Tag Archives: William Wordsworth

By Mark Sandy, Professor of English, Durham University, United Kingdom

Professor Mark Sandy at the Armstrong Browning Library

Between August and September 2017, I held a one-month Visiting Scholars Fellowship to conduct research in the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, for my current book-length project, Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Environment (under contract with Edinburgh University Press).

Consequently, nestled away in Central Texas, a stone’s throw away from the Brazos River, my family (partner, Hazel, and son, Michael) and I discovered the unexpected charm of the Armstrong Browning Library, with its distinctive and beautiful wrought bronze doors, Italianate marble interiors, and iridescent stained-glass windows. All of these decorative features by the design of the library’s founder, Dr A. J. Armstrong, reflect the life and work of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As you might expect, a large part of the library’s rare manuscripts and books collection is dedicated to the Brownings. As a scholar of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I was fascinated, for example, to peruse a copy of the same edition of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems held in Robert Browning’s personal library. But such findings are not the only precious treasures to be found here.

Outside of the Brownings’ circle, the collection of manuscripts, letters, rare books, and periodicals held at the Armstrong Browning Library reveal the life and work of other prominent nineteenth-century figures (including William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, Felicia Hemans, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson) on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the possibility of what these holdings might tell about the intellectual, imaginative, and cultural transatlantic exchanges between Emerson and Thoreau and key British Romantic poets that, before I had experienced its architectural and contemplative charm (especially of the Foyer of Meditation echoic, on occasion, with choral singing), sparked my interest in the Armstrong Browning Library.

Exploring these transatlantic conversations between British and American writers is something of a daunting undertaking, so I concentrated my primary focus on the correspondence between William Wordsworth and his American editor, Henry Reed, as well as some unpublished letters of Wordsworth held at the Armstrong Browning Library. Amongst these unpublished materials of particular interest was a letter by William Wordsworth, dated 10 June, 1834, to John Heraud, author of The Judgement of the Flood. This letter, in Wordsworth’s hand on three pages and (on the basis of two letters with the same date) considered to have been composed at Rydal Mount, expresses the poet’s concern about having trouble with his eyes.

Letter from William Wordsworth to John Abraham Heraud, 10 June 1834. Pages 1 and 4.

Letter from William Wordsworth to John Abraham Heraud, 10 June 1834. Pages 2-3.

About a year earlier, Emerson’s account of his first visit (28 August, 1833) to Rydal Mount corroborates Wordsworth’s concerns about his poor eyesight. This concern with physical eyesight and poetic vision helped inform an article I was completing on “‘Strength in What Remains Behind”: Wordsworth and the Question of Ageing’ (forthcoming in a 2018 special issue of Romanticism on ‘Ageing and Romanticism’, edited by Jonathon Shears and David Fallon), as well as speaking to Emerson’s emphasis on the image of the all-seeing and clear-sighted ‘transparent eyeball’ (Nature). These observations will inform the discussion of the introduction to my study of Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism.

After this initial foray into Wordsworth’s correspondence, I wanted to cast my net more widely within the Armstrong Browning Library collection in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the interactions (positive and negative) of Emerson and Thoreau with the ideas, thoughts, and works of the British Romantics (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley). Pertinent copies of American printed nineteenth-century editions and anthologies of British Romantic writers accessible at the Armstrong Browning Library, included The Poetical Works of S.T. Coleridge (New York, circa 1888) and The Works of Lord Byron (New York, 1845), as well as anthologies, such as British Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1929).

The Works of Lord Byron in Verse and Prose. New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1845.

With these earlier editions and anthologies, I was able to arrive at a much more fine-grained understanding of which particular works by British Romantic poets were in circulation in the United States and, by cross-checking with bibliographical records of Thoreau’s personal library and Emerson’s library borrowings, which works especially were likely to have been read by Emerson and Thoreau. My task was also helped by the fact that, on several occasions, as was the case with the edition of The Works of Lord Byron (New York, 1845; originally published 1835), owned by Thoreau, and the edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments (London, 1840), read by Emerson, the Armstrong Browning Library owned the exact same or later edition of that publication.

A manuscript edition twenty-volume set of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. 20 Vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), signed by the publisher and containing an original leaf (in Thoreau’s hand) of his reflections on the idea of suffering in ‘The Sankhya Karika’ also provided further insights into Thoreau’s thought, more generally, and, more specifically, his particular responses to British Romantic poets. For instance, on observing the Charles River, one ‘cloudy evening’ in the summer of 1845, Thoreau is moved towards a sense of Wordsworthian things sublime and remarks, ‘“I was reminded of the way that in which Wordsworth so coldly speaks of some natural visions or scenes “giving him pleasure.”’ (Vol. 8, Journal II, p. 295).

Henry David Thoreau. The Sankhya Karita. Manuscript. Page 1.

Henry David Thoreau. The Sankhya Karita. Manuscript. Page 2.

Having the opportunity to investigate these personal and cultural exchanges, through using the nineteenth-century rare manuscripts and books collections at the Armstrong Browning Library, has greatly informed the underpinnings of my present book project’s larger mapping of these transatlantic transmissions and transformations of, as well as exchanges with, British Romanticism. On a more personal and pleasurable note of my own, I cannot thank the staff of the Armstrong Browning Library enough for all their unstinting helpfulness, good humour, kindnesses, and hospitality to both myself and my family during our visit.

In fall 2016, students in Dr. Kristen Pond’s upper-level English course, “Literary Networks in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” explored the relationships between writers of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist Periods and the influences they had on each other’s works. “Authors did not, in fact, work alone,” Dr. Pond argued, “but often collaborated, either directly by each person contributing something to the final piece or indirectly through the influence of conversations, interactions, or from reading one another’s works.” Utilizing the letters, manuscripts, rare books, and other collection materials at the Armstrong Browning Library, the students ended their semester by curating an exhibition that uncovered connections between one particular literary figure and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—the centers of the literary network for the course—or another significant literary figure.

The exhibition Making Connections: Literary Networks in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries is on display in the Hankamer Treasure Room, Armstrong Browning Library, until April 21, 2017.

The Armstrong Browning Library would like to thank Dr. Kristen Pond and the students who made this exhibition possible:

William Wordsworth was the foremost of the early Romantic poets in England, known on the one hand for his use of familiar imagery and language; on the other, for his complex and contemplative blank verse; and in either case, for his devotion to nature. Notable works include Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and The Prelude, which was not published until after his death in 1850.

The ABL has several rare editions of Wordsworth’s poetry, including three inscribed copies, in addition to five unpublished or partially published letters.

William Wordsworth. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. New ed. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1832.

William Wordsworth. Grace Darling. Carlisle: Printed at the office of Charles Thurnam, 1843.

Privately printed and inscribed by the author.

In his poem, Wordsworth celebrates the heroics of Grace Darling, who became a Victorian icon for her role in rescuing the survivors of the Forfarshire after it was shipwrecked near her father’s lighthouse in 1838. This extremely rare edition once belonged to the American musical theater composer Jerome Kern.

Letter from William Wordsworth to Francis Merewether. 7 August [1829].

Francis Merewether was a High-Church priest and pamphleteer who had asked Wordsworth to speak on his behalf to Professor John Wilson, best known for his contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine under the pseudonym of Christopher North. Wordsworth obliged with this reply, reporting that “Professor Wilson” would be “willing to look over” Merewether’s “papers . . . and to admit them if suitable.”

William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. London: J. & A. Arch, 1798.

First edition, second issue. Possibly the first printing to be sold instead of privately distributed.

The anonymous publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 was one of the most important events in British literary history. Wordsworth’s collection, with several contributions by Coleridge, ushered in a new era in which imagination and emotion mattered more than formal poetic diction.

Letter from William Wordsworth to Allan Cunningham 8 January 1827.

The “Mr. Kenyon” to whom Wordsworth refers in this letter is probably John Kenyon, fellow poet and friend to Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as to the Brownings, whom he introduced to each other. Wordsworth wants Cunningham to vote in favor of Kenyon’s acceptance to the Athenaeum club, whose members would eventually include Michael Faraday, Matthew Arnold, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Letter from William Wordsworth to John Abraham Heraud. 10 June [1834].

Wordsworth had recently been instructed to rest his eyes, so he had been unable to read Heraud’s Judgment of the Flood on his own. His excuse for not having the entire work read aloud suggests how he might have hoped his own philosophical poetry would be read, at least when he was not reciting it himself:

You are a thinking writer–& I said “I must not go on with this, till I can have my eyes upon the page” & this I beg you would take as expressing of real admiration.

Letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Joshua Watson and Archdeacon Watson. [2 June 1820].

Dorothy Wordsworth was William Wordsworth’s sister, close friend, and longtime collaborator. Her journals reveal many details about life in the household she shared with her brother and his family. Here, she comments on the health of her youngest brother, Christopher.

The Armstrong Browning Library owns several other Wordsworth letters:

Letter from William Wordsworth to Unidentified Correspondent. 15 September 1818.

Letter from William Wordsworth the Unidentified Correspondent. 27 November 1835.

Scholars know the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University as a world-class research library devoted to the lives and works of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In addition to housing the world’s largest collection of books, letters, manuscripts, and memorabilia related to the Brownings, the library houses a substantial collection of primary and secondary materials related to nineteenth-century literature and culture. The Victorian Letter and Manuscript Collection includes almost 2,500 items from literary, political, ecclesiastical, scientific, and cultural figures in the nineteenth century. Letters, manuscripts, and books from Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Matthew Arnold, Charles Babbage, J. M. Barrie, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michael Faraday, W. E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Victor Hugo, Thomas Henry Huxley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, George MacDonald, John-Henry Newman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Wordsworth will be featured in the exhibit. In future blogs about the exhibit you can find out how Elizabeth Barrett Browning was related to Charles Babbage, where Victor Hugo spent his summer vacation, who was b__k b__ll__ed, and what happened to Miss Brodie’s cow.